This is the blog of Robert Catterall, an IBM Db2 for z/OS specialist. The opinions expressed herein are the author's, and should not be construed as reflecting official positions of the IBM Corporation.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Wow II - DB2 Data Sharing Comes to the Linux/System x Platform

Last year, when I was working as an independent DB2 consultant and trainer, I posted a blog entry on IBM's announcement of its DB2 pureScale technology. pureScale brought to DB2 for AIX, running on IBM's POWER6 and POWER7 servers, the advanced shared-data architecture technology that had delivered, for 15 years, unprecedented levels of availability and scalability for users of DB2 running on IBM System z servers. With pureScale, organizations could harness the processing resources of multiple DB2 for AIX servers sharing concurrent read/write access to one database in a clustered-server, shared-disk configuration. Though I had been around DB2 data sharing since its beta release in the mid-1990s, the pureScale announcement struck me as being really big news. "Wow" pretty much summed up my initial reaction, and that's how I opened the aforementioned blog entry.

Less than a year later, it's time for Wow II. A few days ago (August 5, to be precise), at an event in Beijing, IBM took the wraps off of DB2 pureScale for the Intel-based System x server platform running the SUSE Linux operating system (the supported servers are the System x3650 M3, the x3690 X5, and the x3850 X5). AIX and POWER are a great computing combination, delivering high availability, rock-solid reliability, and a particularly rich set of features and functions. That said, the combination of Linux and Intel-based servers continues to advance as a platform for enterprise data-serving. I remember thinking, as I considered the initial pureScale announcement (Wow I), that it would be great to see the technology extended to Linux and System x. What surprises me about the announcement of DB2 pureScale for System x is that it happened so soon after pureScale first made the scene. Yeah, I was hoping for this, but I thought I'd have to wait longer before seeing it.Linux-on-Intel users, trust me on this one: you now have a data-serving solution that can take your business-critical database systems to heights of up-time and throughput that you may have thought were unattainable. Remember, this technology -- global lock and page cache structures housed in servers that act as shared-memory devices, forming the hub of a configuration that can scale up to dozens of nodes with remarkably low overhead -- implements the same shared-data architecture that has proven itself in IBM parallel sysplex mainframe clusters that have delivered the goods for years, in some of the most demanding high-availability and high-volume application environments in the world. Is it your only shared-data choice in the world of relational database and Linux/Intel servers? No. Is it your best choice? Absolutely. Hands-down. No doubt about it.

Check out DB2 pureScale on System x, and have some Wow time of your own.